Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Making of the Protestant Succession
- 1 The Political Consequences of the Cuckoldy German Turnip Farmer
- 2 ‘They May Well Bear the Same Name’: The Revolution and the Succession in the Election of 1715
- 3 The Backlash Against Anglican Catholicity, 1709–18
- 4 ‘The End of the Beginning?’ The Rhetorics of Revolutions in the Political Sermons of 1688–1716
- 5 Security, Stability and Credit: The Hanoverian Succession and the Politics of the Financial Revolution
- 6 Colonial Policy in North America, 1689–1717
- 7 Securing the Union and the Hanoverian Succession in Scotland, 1707–37
- 8 Patriotism after the Hanoverian Succession
- 9 Displaced but Not Replaced: The Continuation of Dutch Intellectual Influences in Early Hanoverian Britain
- 10 Some Hidden Thunder: Hanover, Saxony and the Management of Political Union, 1697–1763
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
10 - Some Hidden Thunder: Hanover, Saxony and the Management of Political Union, 1697–1763
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Making of the Protestant Succession
- 1 The Political Consequences of the Cuckoldy German Turnip Farmer
- 2 ‘They May Well Bear the Same Name’: The Revolution and the Succession in the Election of 1715
- 3 The Backlash Against Anglican Catholicity, 1709–18
- 4 ‘The End of the Beginning?’ The Rhetorics of Revolutions in the Political Sermons of 1688–1716
- 5 Security, Stability and Credit: The Hanoverian Succession and the Politics of the Financial Revolution
- 6 Colonial Policy in North America, 1689–1717
- 7 Securing the Union and the Hanoverian Succession in Scotland, 1707–37
- 8 Patriotism after the Hanoverian Succession
- 9 Displaced but Not Replaced: The Continuation of Dutch Intellectual Influences in Early Hanoverian Britain
- 10 Some Hidden Thunder: Hanover, Saxony and the Management of Political Union, 1697–1763
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
Is there not some chosen Curse,
Some hidden Thunder in the Stores of Heaven,
Red with uncommon Wrath, to Blast the Man
Who owes his Greatness to his Country's Ruin!
Joseph Addison, Cato. A Tragedy in Five Acts (1713)For the historian, the parallels between the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in the early eighteenth century are striking, even if the subsequent fates of the two states mean that direct comparisons have rarely been undertaken. Both were union states that had transcended the loose personal or dynastic unions that characterised the political structures of much of late medieval and early modern Europe by implementing the only two full parliamentary unions seen in Europe before 1789: between Poland and Lithuania in 1569, and between England and Scotland in 1707. Like Scotland after 1707, Lithuania kept its own legal system and its own laws after 1569. In both cases, the unions were part of a wider union state in which other parts had a different relationship to the centre: in the United Kingdom, Wales had been incorporated into England in the 1530s, while Ireland had its own parliament until 1801; in Poland-Lithuania, Royal Prussia was included in the 1569 parliamentary union, but had wide privileges, including the retention of its own law codes and urban representation in its Landtag, while the Ukrainian palatinates incorporated into Poland from Lithuania in 1569 kept Lithuanian law and their own chancery records, the Metryka Ruska.
The similarities were not just structural. Both systems struggled with the problems of religious pluralism and both drew heavily in their political thought and artistic culture on the heritage of the Roman Republic with its defence of liberty against dictators or kings who sought to undermine it: Joseph Addison's great tragedy Cato, which opened in April 1713 to wild acclaim from Whigs and Tories alike, was not translated into Polish until 1809, but its sentiments suffused Polish political culture. When Addison's Cato states that ‘A day, an hour of virtuous liberty/ Is worth a whole eternity in bondage’, he is expressing a common Polish sentiment: malo periculosam libertatem quam quietam servitutem (better in perilous liberty than in quiet servitude), a phrase echoed by Rousseau and made famous by Thomas Jefferson as the Americans boldly constructed their own version of the republican vision.
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- The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and its Empire , pp. 193 - 211Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019